William Decker

Crosby and a former student set off down the narrow thoroughfare riding in a dune buggy outfitted with snap-on canvas sides. “I was woefully ill prepared, except I did have Crespí’s and Serra’s diaries."

On June 19, 1769, Father Junípero Serra recorded the following incident in his journal. The Franciscan priest, in the company of Gaspar de Portolá and 18 other men, had set out from the tiny outpost of Velicatá in Baja California and headed north into the unknown. They had spent 35 days on the trail when Portolá’s cook and servant became exasperated with a burro that had halted in front of him. It refused to budge.

Rivera's trail to San Diego, followed by Portolá/Serra party, 1769. "Serra was constantly bitching about how Rivera wouldn’t cooperate when they wanted to found a new mission."

The servant, a Genoese named Ygnacio, leapt off his mount, drew his sword, and plunged it up the anus of the recalcitrant beast. Serra’s notes don’t describe Portolá’s demeanor when he heard about this, only his actions: “Having taken the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the man having confessed burricide, [Portolá] deprived him of his job, stripped him of his arms, condemned him to follow the expedition on foot, and fined him four times the price of the animal…”

Rivera's trail into San Diego, 1769. “Serra excommunicated Rivera, and it lasted all his life. Yet when he died, he was carrying devotional writings with him on the trail.”

Serra provides no other information about the fracas. He doesn’t say if the burro screamed and created a stampede among its fellows. Serra never discloses whether the hotheaded servant regained his master’s esteem later in the journey, nor does the future founder of San Diego write about hundreds of other details that the modern reader might long to know. Portolá also kept a diary, but his jottings are even more laconic than the priest’s, perhaps for the following reason.

“Portolá is the real hero of the whole business of occupying Alta California.”

The Serra/Portolá party wasn’t blazing the northbound trail. A larger expeditionary force had set out seven and a half weeks before them. If you think of San Diego as the Plymouth Rock of the West Coast (a reasonable comparison), then the participants in the first expedition were analogous to the passengers on the Mayflower. They included a 47-year-old Mallorcan priest named Juan Crespí and a young Spanish mariner, Miguel Cañizares, both of whom had been assigned to keep a journal.

José de Gálvez. Gálvez had initially ordered Portolá to fire Rivera. “All you can say about Gálvez is that he met with Portolá, and thereafter we find him delegating the authority to Rivera to run and organize the expedition.”

Crespí and Cañizares followed their orders, and on some topics they delivered an abundance of information. Anytime the priest spotted a site where a mission could be established (no matter how dubious its prospects), he made an enthusiastic notation to that effect. Cañizares, in contrast, delivered a superfluity of detail about the instructions given every night to the expedition’s sentinels and guards. Both men offered fleeting glimpses into their group’s interpersonal dynamics. On the sixth day out, Cañizares, for example, wrote, “At five in the morning we were told that one of the two Indians [included in the expedition] who had received extreme unction yesterday had died and that three more had fallen ill. This aroused the captain’s suspicion, so he ordered the Indians to assemble, urging them to continue on such a holy expedition as ours, and not to assume that those who had died had done so as a result of joining our enterprise.”

Father Junípero Serra. Although Serra and his fellow Franciscans have long gotten the credit for exploration of Alta California, Crosby thinks their contribution has been “grossly overblown.”

But the diaries of Crespí and Cañizares leave out a lot. Neither lists the first expedition’s participants, an omission with important genealogical consequences: Up until now, no one could know whether he or she had descended from one of California’s very first pioneers. For another thing, although Crespí and Cañizares both estimated the daily distances and directions they traveled, the latitudes they recorded were inaccurate. As a result, no one has been able to follow in the footsteps of the first explorers to travel to California by land.

Crosby met a number of people who recognized place names from the 200-year-old diaries. “But everything was in the mountains, off to the east of us. And when I asked about a road, they looked at me like, ‘Road? Hey, it’s tough enough to get a mule through there!’ ”

All this has changed as a result of the detective work performed by Harry Crosby, a La Jolla resident best known for his discovery (in the early 1970s) of the phenomenal cave paintings of Baja California. In November, the El Cajon–based Sunbelt Publications will publish Crosby’s Gateway to Alta California. The new book at last offers a definitive list of the men who came to San Diego on the first and second expeditions. It also includes detailed maps of their route, along with extensive excerpts from both first-expedition diaries. Perhaps its most profound contribution is that it puts the expeditions into perspective, revealing the political forces driving Spanish expansion and the individuals who made it possible for Spain to extend its influence over the territory that later became the 31st American state.

Crosby, 76, says it’s a very different story from the one he learned while growing up in San Diego. Then, “The concept was: The Spaniards dropped down from out of the clouds. Or they landed. Or they rode in — nobody explaining from where. They founded San Diego, and California history began. It was magical! The king had decided he wanted to occupy Alta California, so here they were.”

He says the seven-volume History of California, published in 1886 by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, influenced generations of textbooks that followed it. Although that work reported almost every step taken by Serra after he left San Diego and began establishing the Franciscan mission chain to the north, it all but ignored the expeditions that brought the missionaries through the uncharted territory between Velicatá and San Diego. “Two diaries were kept,” Bancroft’s history noted, “…but neither affords matter of much interest to the historical student, since it would serve no good purpose to repeat the details of that monotonous march.”

Crosby thinks that this “was plain old Yankee chauvinism,” an assumption that American readers wouldn’t have any interest in anything outside their borders. The ramifications of this conceit carried over into the 20th Century. He says that the “well-regarded California historian,” Charles E. Chapman, asserted in 1921 that the 1769 expeditions set out from a staging area “about 150 miles due south of San Diego.” This is strange, Crosby notes, “since the actual airline distance [to Velicatá] is 220 miles, “and a point 150 miles due south of here “would also be 65 miles out to sea!”

This sort of ignorance exasperates him now. But during his early adult life Crosby had little interest in the founding of San Diego. In the 1950s, he taught science at Memorial Junior High and Mission Bay and La Jolla High Schools. In 1963 he decided to become a professional photographer, and he was working on that career when he heard one day about a project sponsored by Copley Books and the Commission of the Californias. They wanted to publish a volume in conjunction with the California bicentennial celebrations scheduled to unfold in 1969, the idea being to chronicle the route taken by Serra and Portolá from Loreto, in the south of Baja California, all the way north to San Francisco Bay. Richard Pourade, the Copley Books historian, would write short passages to accompany photographs showing what the route would have looked like to the early explorers.

“I was young and stupid,” Crosby says now. He had no reservations as he pitched Pourade on his qualifications for the photo assignment. Crosby had traveled in the Mexican mainland with his family and students, and there he had picked up the “hacker’s Spanish” he still speaks. About Baja California, he knew almost nothing, but he took Pourade’s word that the car road down the peninsula was the route Serra followed up to San Diego.

Today that road is known as Highway 1, but early in 1967 it was still unpaved, “what they call a brecha,”Crosby recalls, “not a built road but a thing just made by wheel tracks.” Crosby and a former student named Paul Ganster set off down the narrow thoroughfare riding in a dune buggy outfitted with snap-on canvas sides to keep out the ubiquitous dust. “I was woefully ill prepared,” Crosby recalls, “except I did have Crespí’s and Serra’s diaries. And I had had a lot of experience in Mexico.”

He says one thing the latter taught him was that “when you’re on a dirt road, especially a homemade dirt road, you don’t drive by any source of information. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped out in an open field and walked across to some guy who was hoeing or tending sheep and just barber-shopped about where I was headed, where I’d come from, what’s over there, and so on. Because that’s the way you learn.”

As he drove south along the west coast of the Baja California peninsula, Crosby met a number of people who recognized place names from the 200-year-old diaries. “But everything was in the mountains, off to the east of us. And when I asked about a road, they looked at me like, ‘Road? Hey, it’s tough enough to get a mule through there!’ ”

Crosby eventually acknowledged the depressing truth: the route described in the expedition diaries must have followed trails through the mountain wilderness. The story of how he carried out his photo assignment is complicated. To summarize, he wound up hiring men, mules, and burros. Using the diaries and a combination of common sense and knowledge gleaned from their guides and local ranchers, the entourage covered some 600 miles that included a best-guess approximation of the route the explorers had followed from Loreto. By the time he rolled back into San Diego, Crosby felt “practically sure” he had identified Serra’s historic route. This was no mean accomplishment. The route crossed Highway 1 in San Ignacio and converged with it for the last few miles south of today’s border. But otherwise, Serra’s route bore no relation to the highway.

Years passed before Crosby began to suspect he’d made errors in the 300-mile-long portion of the trail that ran north of Velicatá, the part that was terra incognita in 1769. Other things occupied Crosby’s attention during the 1970s and ’80s. First there were the cave paintings. Crosby saw his first one in the course of the 1967 photo assignment, and in 1971 another trip to Baja California led him to a rich concentration of the arresting ancient murals. When Crosby realized that no scholar had ever recognized the existence of more than a few, he devoted years to the task of finding, photographing, and writing about 180 rock art sites (first in The Cave Paintings of Baja California, published by Copley Books in 1975, then in an expanded work reprinted by Sunbelt Publishing 22 years later).

The time he spent exploring Baja California’s mountains ignited Crosby’s interest in the frontier people who inhabit its remote enclaves. They’re the last of the “Californios,” descendants of the individuals whom the Jesuits had brought to Baja California: Spanish mission servants and soldiers and their wives. In 1981, Crosby wrote a book that recounted their history and described their mountain communities. Studying the Californios also made him realize that no historian had written in depth about the years in which the Jesuits ruled the peninsula (1697 to 1768). So Crosby took on that task, and in 1994 the University of New Mexico published the result.

That history, Antigua California, won acclaim as well as the Bancroft Prize (awarded every year to the best book on the history of the Southwest). When Crosby asked himself what project he should tackle next, he says his thoughts returned to the pioneering 1769 overland journey to San Diego. For one thing, he’d made a wonderful discovery, one that he had never shared with the world. It occurred in 1982, when Crosby was reviewing old documents at the national archive in Mexico City. “It’s located in a former penitentiary,” Crosby says. “There’s a big hall with a bunch of side halls where the cells were, and that’s where they keep the documents.” He was sitting in the main hall one day skimming a hodgepodge of records pertaining to Spanish military affairs when a 386-page sheaf of sturdy papers came into his hands. It turned out to be an account book prepared by an Alta California pioneer named José Francisco Ortega. It recorded when and where each of about 130 of Alta California’s earliest soldier-pioneers had been paid and what supplies each had received. Crosby grasped at once how significant this information was. Although Ortega’s account book included men from later expeditions as well as the first pioneers, the dates made it possible to discern which group was which.

Crosby had the account book microfilmed. Today he keeps the reel close at hand; he can load it into the microfilm reader in his office anytime he has the urge to review Ortega’s careful copperplate once again. As he scrolled through the entries one recent day, he still sounded jubilant. “Here’s a good one,” he murmured. It recorded how Francisco Javier Aguilar on the 29th of June, 1769, received two pairs of shoes, three yards of cotton cloth, several knives, clove and cinnamon, soap, tobacco, thread, a notebook, and various other items. The record shows that Aguilar was in San Diego when he got these things. Since the second expedition, the one that included Serra and Portolá, didn’t arrive until July 1, this represented proof that Aguilar was one of the 31 white men who came to San Diego in the first group.

By poring over the account book and analyzing the entries in it, Crosby eventually deduced the identities of all 36 of the soldiers in the first and second expeditions. (Previously, only 8 had been conclusively identified.) He wanted to publicize these findings, and he wanted to set the record straight about the opening of the Alta California frontier. Although Serra and his fellow Franciscans have long gotten the credit for that accomplishment, Crosby thinks their contribution has been “grossly overblown.” The Jesuit contribution, he asserts, was far more crucial.

The publication of his history of the Jesuits in Baja California gave Crosby a lot of insight into how little most people know about the Jesuits’ role in both Californias (upper and lower). Even professional historians, he contends, often don’t seem to understand the extent to which Jesuit accomplishments set the stage for the Spanish push northward. And, Crosby says, confusion over the Jesuits’ expulsion from Baja California is rampant; when people hear that the religious order was kicked out, they assume it must have been because of something the Jesuit padres did on the Mexican peninsula. In fact, “They were expelled from the whole Spanish world,” Crosby points out. “California had absolutely nothing to do with it, because the impetus came from the top down.”

The expulsion “was the culmination of political decisions made across the ocean,” Crosby says. “Various forces in the Spanish world were tussling with the Jesuits over every type of power you can think of: economic, land, the use of people.” In many places, the Jesuits had alienated local entrepreneurs by protecting the native Indian populations from exploitation. “Miners, for example, had a great system,” Crosby says. “They would get the local people hooked on alcohol; then they would provide the alcohol in exchange for the labor. For some strange reason, the Jesuits didn’t like that! They thought it was a perversion of the Spanish mission. And so they protected the neophytes. But entrepreneurs had power. They paid taxes. They had the ear of people higher up.”

The Jesuits also owned haciendas in the New World that produced goods competing with those produced by private hacienda owners. And, back in Spain, the Jesuits had incurred the enmity of the king by siding with a religious faction that said the monarch should be subordinate to the power of Rome. The reigning Spanish king, Carlos III, knew that in 1759 Portuguese officials had kicked the Jesuits out of their country and expropriated all the Jesuit property, “a very nice little nest egg, thank you,” Crosby says. He thinks the prospect of claiming such a windfall had as much appeal for Carlos III as any ideology or politics involved. So in the late spring of 1767, Carlos dispatched sealed orders throughout the far reaches of his domain charging the Jesuits “with undermining the authority of kings and popes,” and ordering their arrest and recall to Spain.

On the Mexican mainland, Crosby says, these orders were “implemented so efficiently that in nearly all parts of [the country], the surprise arrests of Jesuits took place on the same day” (June 25, 1767, less than a month after the king had commanded it). But Baja California was “too remote…to be included in the basic timetable for the Jesuit expulsion; it became a sequel to the main event.”

It took six long months for that sequel to reach its climax, and its main protagonist was the 50-year-old Gaspar de Portolá. “Portolá is the real hero of the whole business of occupying Alta California,” Crosby asserts. “And in spite of the fact that his name is always mentioned, I don’t think people begin to appreciate what he actually did. That’s one of the other purposes of my book — to flesh out the bones of Portolá.”

A Catalan bachelor, Portolá had devoted his life to military service. Had he been born today, Crosby thinks that “he might have been a very good personnel manager for a major corporation… He’d be the guy who sees what needs to be done and does it.” But Crosby says that in 18th-century Spain, Portolá’s social standing would have prohibited him from a life in commerce. “That would have been beneath his dignity. “In this Crosby likens Portolá to “one of the younger sons in the English Empire days. They weren’t going to inherit the estate or the title, but they could go into the Army and have honorable careers.”

Portolá was in Tepic in early June 1767, serving as the second-in-command to a Spanish colonel who was encamped there, when he received new orders. They said nothing about leading an expedition to Alta California. But they named Portolá as Baja California’s new governor and directed him to go to the peninsula and carry out the removal of the Jesuits.

Look at a map of the Gulf of California, and that body of water doesn’t seem a formidable barrier: at the widest point it’s only about 150 miles across. However, the Spaniards’ naval base on the west coast of mainland Mexico was located at San Blas, almost 500 miles southeast of the Baja California capital of Loreto. Crosby points out that in the summer months violent chubascos can sweep across the gulf. When Portolá in July of 1767 set off with 50 men in two ships, he ran into such daunting wind and waves that the ships had to turn back. Problems with repairs and bad weather delayed their next attempt at a crossing until August 24, and then Portolá and his entourage ran into another chubasco that drove the two ships apart. Yet again, Portolá’s craft was blown back to the mainland, where he waited for more than a month for the second ship to show up. He sailed a third time on October 19, ran into still more hellish weather, and again got separated from the vessel that was carrying half his troops. But in late November, Portolá’s ship finally landed, albeit about 275 miles south of Loreto.

Upon his arrival, he must have felt relief to be back on solid ground. But he had other pressing concerns. Portolá knew that his superiors in Mexico and Spain were eager to get their hands on the riches they thought the Baja California Jesuits had amassed. Because of the peninsula’s isolation, Spanish officials had allowed the Jesuits to treat it as a private fiefdom. The padres had handpicked the presidial soldiers and exercised complete control over them — unlike anywhere else in the Spanish domain. As a result, the Spanish officials expected armed resistance from this de facto private army. Crosby says that’s why Portolá sailed to the peninsula with 50 soldiers under his command.“Which of course demonstrates [the Spaniards’] complete lack of comprehension of the frontier!” he adds. “No Spanish official had ever visited [Baja] California — ever, ever, ever. Not one. Not a ship. They were clueless.” Nowhere in the world had the Jesuits resisted the authority of the crown. “They’d never done anything remotely like that! Their record was impeccable.”

Crosby says there was another reason why the Spaniards should have known that the Baja California Jesuits would return to Spain without a fuss: the padres had already volunteered to give up their 14 missions on the peninsula. Far from being treasure houses, their religious outposts had experienced “a series of calamities,” Crosby writes. A prolonged drought had been accompanied by “four successive years [of] devastating clouds of locusts [that] had decimated crops and natural forage at all but the northernmost missions. Mission herds were reduced by half… Everyone was hungry, and only a quarter of their [Indian] neophytes could be properly clothed.”

Why didn’t Portolá and his superiors know this? “There may have been a certain amount of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing,” Crosby answers. Communication lines were sketchy 235 years ago. But Crosby says that once Portolá arrived in Loreto, it didn’t take long for the new governor to shed his preconceptions and figure out what was going on.

In the days and weeks after Portolá’s arrival, every Jesuit he met greeted him with courtesy and seemed resigned to returning to Spain. Portolá responded by extending civilities to the priests, which Crosby notes in his book with admiration. For almost a month, Portolá delayed the formal presentation of the expulsion order to the head of the Baja California Jesuits, waiting until the day after Christmas so that the priests could celebrate the religious holiday in relative tranquillity. “The governor was a gentleman, religious and humane,” Crosby writes. “He had no desire to bully or humiliate those he had come to depose; indeed, every subsequent Jesuit account extolled his kindness, courtesy, and compassion.”

Once he unveiled the king’s decree, Portolá found an excuse to ignore its directive to lock the Jesuits in their rooms, under guard. The proclamation also prohibited the order from celebrating Mass, but when the day for the priests’ departure, February 2, 1768, arrived, the governor again flouted his instructions and allowed the padres to preside over two final services for the people they had shepherded for so long. One of the Jesuits later described the scene on the beach as the members of the order prepared to embark upon their sea voyage. “We were surrounded on all sides by the people, the soldiers of the presidio among them. Some knelt on the sand to kiss our hands and feet, others knelt with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, publicly pleading for pardon. Others tenderly embraced the missionaries, bidding them farewell and wishing them a happy voyage through loud weeping and sobbing. This sad spectacle moved the Governor to tears.”

By the time the Jesuits left, Portola’s attitude toward the soldiers of the presidio in Loreto had undergone a dramatic reversal, according to Crosby. The historian says Portolá almost certainly must have arrived in Baja California prejudiced against the soldiers and their captain, Don Fernando de Rivera y Moncada. Rivera was a criollo, descended from Spaniards but born in the New World — “a breed looked down on by European born officers and government officials,” Crosby notes. And Rivera had a second “terrible disadvantage,” according to the historian. “He was the Jesuits’ boy. They made him, and they appreciated him. Rivera, in turn, had repaid the Jesuits with a conspicuous loyalty that made him even more suspect in other Spaniards’ eyes. He was seen as being their toady, their lackey.”

Within weeks if not days of Portolá’s arrival, however, the new governor comprehended that the Jesuits had created a unique situation in Baja California. They had offered the presidial soldiers a decent salary and created “a family-friendly atmosphere,” Crosby says. The Jesuit padres had made it their policy to fire undesirable types; they refused to tolerate alcoholism, for example. Only in the remoteness of Baja California was this possible; nowhere else in New Spain did the missionaries exercise that sort of power. The result was that “the people who were retained [on the peninsula] were a very different flock of folk,” Crosby says, both more literate and more virtuous than their counterparts on the mainland. The men Portolá had brought with him “were professional soldiers, Spanish or Creole, most of whom had chosen military service because they were poor and jobless, not from any patriotic calling,” Crosby writes. “Whatever skills they may have had, they had proved ill-prepared to deal with grueling challenges in an alien environment. By contrast, the men of the [Baja] California presidio were very much at home in every sense of the word.”

Portolá then made a bold move, asking the viceroy of Mexico for permission to send half his Spanish dragoons back to mainland duty and to hire instead as many of the presidio soldiers as possible, “even the two officers who serve as captain and lieutenant. “In March, Portolá got word indicating that the viceroy had given the nod to this plan. He also learned the startling news that the visitor general of Mexico would soon be arriving in Baja California.

The visitor general, José de Gálvez, “has to be one of the most complicated” of all the figures involved in the founding of San Diego, Crosby declares. “All the forces that were at work in Gálvez can only be dreamed about. He was a little man, which could help to account for something slightly Napoleonic about him.” He sprang from the poor Spanish gentry. “They were somebody, but they didn’t have any money to support it,” the historian says. “Through family connections, he had wangled a municipal judgeship. He was a shameless cultivator of people, and he apparently was very bright. Nobody doubts that. And he had a real ability to influence people.” Crosby says somehow Gálvez worked his connections to win an appointment as visitor general to Mexico.

This position has no counterpart in the world today. The visitors general, Crosby explains, were “special royal examiners sent to the major overseas regions.” Temporarily outranking the viceroys and their regional councils, they were supposed to inspect local conditions and impose new regulations created to fund Spanish military buildups in various parts of the globe. “This was a powerful post!” Crosby emphasizes. “I mean, from Gálvez’s perspective, there was not one position in the empire that he could have vaulted into from that municipal judgeship that would have had one-quarter the power that a visitor general would have. It was not only a dream come true, but it put him into a position to cultivate greater power.”

Most highborn Spaniards found the idea of any service in the colonies revolting, Crosby says. It required a willingness to leave the comforts of Spain and confront a variety of potential dangers in the New World, then considered “a place for younger sons and poorer relatives and that sort of thing,” Crosby says. “It was not a simple thing to go across the seas. Scurvy was still a major problem. There were storms, and ships could be becalmed. And stories about diseases in the New World got back to Europe and got amplified out of proportion even to their reality. So there were real fears.” The first man appointed visitor general to Mexico had sidestepped the job. The second appointee “had to be threatened with imprisonment and fines before he grudgingly put to sea,” Crosby writes, “and even then he avoided the unwelcome chore by dying before making landfall.”

In contrast, “I don’t think anybody ever accused Gálvez of being gutless,” Crosby says. “He was very ambitious.” Not long after Gálvez’s 1765 arrival in New Spain, he concocted a scheme for enlarging his power and influence. Although Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo had claimed much of the west coast of North America in 1542, Spain had failed to establish any settlements there or to otherwise exploit the vast wilderness. Interest in doing so warmed 60 years later, when the Spanish explorer Don Sebastián Vizcaíno returned to the coast, naming both San Diego Bay in the south and Monterey Bay up north. But the Spanish kings, distracted by other events, continued to ignore Alta California for more than another 160 years.

Gálvez wanted to change that. “He saw —rightly — that it would be a hell of a coup for him if he could pull this off and occupy the territory,” Crosby says. Concerns in Spain were mounting that foreign rivals might gain entrée to the vast undeveloped Spanish territory. Crosby says the number of Dutch and English ships in the Pacific was increasing, and as early as the 1740s, reports of Russian incursions into western North America had begun to circulate. Less than a year after he landed in Mexico, Gálvez quietly began laying the groundwork for a push to the northwest. In May 1768, Crosby says, Gálvez finally won from the viceroy “a mandate to proceed with his dearest and most ambitious scheme.”

A man of tremendous energy, Gálvez was a compulsive micromanager, according to Crosby, who thinks the latter tendency may have stemmed from the visitor general’s childhood limitations. “He’d been a poor boy. For all we know, he had to run his family’s finances. If they had servants, he probably was responsible for directing them. So his vision was that he had to see to every detail of everything. You can’t believe the extremes to which he carried this.” To help ensure the success of his grandiose plan for personal and national glory, Gálvez was happy to make the unprecedented trip to Baja California.

By chance, his journey across the Gulf of California rivaled that of Portolá’s in misery; the crossing lasted five storm-battered weeks. Crosby thinks this was fortuitous. He speculates that it probably helped Portolá convince Gálvez that the leaders of the northbound expedition should travel overland, rather than in the three ships Gálvez planned to send around the tip of the peninsula and up the coast. On the Pacific side, both the prevailing winds and the currents work against a mariner heading north. Furthermore, “Portolá was a landlubber,” Crosby says. “He wasn’t from any sailing part of Spain.” As things turned out, the men who did travel by sea fared far worse than the overland pioneers. One of the three ships disappeared, and more than half the sailors on the other two vessels died from what was alleged to be scurvy.

“All the sensible decisions were made by Portolá!” Crosby exclaims. He thinks another crucial one was Portolá’s volunteering to leave Baja and go north. The historian can imagine how meeting and talking with Gálvez must have revealed the visitor general’s “grossly inflated” expectations for Baja California. It must have been clear he was obsessed with establishing Spanish settlements in San Diego and Monterey and that he had little interest in fixing any problems in the old Jesuit territory. Crosby writes that Portolá’s options were clear: “He could stay on the peninsula, fight losing political and economic battles, and take the blame for the visitor general’s disappointment.” Or he could “lead a military expedition northward with the possibility of gaining credit for achieving a long-sought royal objective.” Portolá didn’t take long to seek and win the plum assignment.

As important as that decision was, Crosby thinks it pales in comparison to Portolá’s championship of Rivera to lead the path breaking advance march to San Diego. The soldiers that the governor had brought over from the mainland never could have survived in the wilds of Baja California, the historian believes. “They were a bunch of stumblebums! They couldn’t feed their animals! You could learn that gradually, but it’s not the same as being raised there and from the time you’re eight years old going out and taking care of the animals.”

Gálvez had initially ordered Portolá to fire Rivera. Crosby says no record has ever been found that documents why Gálvez quickly changed his mind. “All you can say about Gálvez is that he met with Portolá, and thereafter we find him delegating the authority to Rivera to run and organize the expedition.” This “sea change” is obvious, Crosby contends, “And the only agent of that change that makes any sense at all is Gaspar de Portolá.” He adds that Gálvez and Rivera did spend about ten days traveling around the south of the peninsula together. “And I think Gálvez must have also to some extent approved of the cut of Rivera’s jib.”

Of all the central characters involved in the founding of San Diego, Rivera is the historian’s favorite. “He’s a very complicated man,” Crosby states. Born into the criollo gentry on the Mexican mainland, the 10th of 11 children, Rivera began serving in the Baja California presidio at the age of 17. Within ten years, the Jesuits had made him the top officer, jumping him “over the heads of two or three other guys who certainly had precedence in terms of time and experience and so forth.” Crosby thinks the facts of Rivera’s competence speak for themselves. “He was a captain or a governor from 1751 to his death in 1781. That’s 30 years, and he never lost a man to the day he died.” (Rivera died in an Indian attack at Yuma.)

Despite that record, “Rivera had very, very bad press in his own time. He wasn’t paid for the last five years of his service, and when he died, his widow couldn’t collect his back pay.” Crosby has not discovered how the payment arrears began, but he says Rivera “was forever being put down by the Franciscans. He was a contentious figure for them, because he was so protective of his men. The Franciscans were forever saying they could found a new mission if they could just have a corporal and four soldiers. And when they got up to Alta California and Rivera saw the size of the Indian bands and how they were armed, he insisted that he had to have at least 15 men. Serra was constantly bitching about how Rivera wouldn’t cooperate when they wanted to found a new mission. And Rivera would doggedly say, ‘If you will send me more soldiers, we’ll found more missions.’ ”

Rivera was “a very private person…apparently very religious.” Crosby thinks this makes Serra’s later treatment of the captain “almost spiteful.” After Rivera clashed with one of Serra’s missionaries over the treatment of a deserter, “Serra excommunicated Rivera, and it lasted all his life,” Crosby says. “Yet when he died, amongst his effects were four books that he was carrying with him on the trail, and they were all devotional writings.”

Careful, conscientious, methodical, unflappable, encyclopedic in his knowledge of the land and its inhabitants — Rivera must have demonstrated all these qualities over the next six months as he organized the expeditions. “His force would have to carry enough food and armaments to be sufficient for months while covering hundreds of miles of heretofore unexplored terrain, much of it reported to be barren and mountainous,” Crosby writes. The first concern would be to pick a team of soldiers and mule drivers who could handle the challenge, and “After twenty-six years of service at Loreto, Fernando de Rivera literally knew every California man’s experience and abilities…” He had watched the younger men grow up; he’d known their parents.

A huge stock of supplies would be needed to sustain the pioneers after the two overland expeditions reached San Diego and began establishing Alta California missions. Gálvez planned to send a large stockpile on the three ships that would sail from La Paz and Cabo San Lucas up the Pacific side of the peninsula. But the overland parties also needed animals and supplies. Crosby says Gálvez made a ruthless decision about where to obtain this materiel. He “understood that his entire scheme would be seen in a more favorable light if it made only frugal demands on the royal treasury,” Crosby records. So Gálvez ordered Rivera to take what he needed from the former Jesuit missions. The visitor general must have known by then about the desperate poverty of the peninsula’s inhabitants, but Crosby writes that “any concern he may have felt for [them] was lost in his zeal to carry out an ambitious strategy and show fiscal restraint — both designed to impress his superiors in Madrid.”

Looting the Jesuit missions to launch the Alta California adventure required the complicity of the Franciscans. Crosby says, “The simple fact of the matter is that Gálvez subverted them.” By the time the visitor general showed up in July 1768, Serra and his padres had been in Baja California for several months. “My sense of it is they were largely disillusioned,” Crosby says. Jesuit California “wasn’t what they expected… There was very little active evangelization to do. They’d been installed as caretakers in a plainly dying mission population. And things were tough. They were seeing it at its worst.”

Sensing the Franciscans’ disappointment, Gálvez “jollied them and joshed with them and wrote them facetious letters — some of the most hypocritical things I’ve ever read!” Crosby says. “Basically, he regarded them as an inexpensive and useful tool, an adjunct.” The Spaniards had learned that missionaries “had a calming influence on the native people they ran into. And the missionaries were cheap.” Galvez realized that, so he dangled in front of the Franciscans “a whole new mission frontier,” Crosby says. “He’s the one who called [the Alta California expansion] the Sacred Expedition, but in this and much else, Gálvez was a hypocrite.”

The ploy worked; Serra and his operations director agreed with Gálvez that they should take what they wanted from the peninsular missions. Crosby thinks Rivera must have felt bad as he began carrying out his instructions; as well as anyone, he understood the missions’ plight. But he was a soldier with a campaign to oversee, and at the end of September 1768, he and his men began heading north and, at eight missions, making stops such as the following, recorded by one of the Franciscans. “From the mission of San Joseph de Comundu, [Rivera] took twenty-three mules broken for saddle and pack, six broken horses, fifteen leather harness sets furnished with everything, [and] a cowhide for mending.” Food supplies gathered at this stop alone included more than 500 pounds of figs, about 100 pounds of brown sugar, more than 2200 pounds of jerked meat, more than 500 pounds of flour, and additional corn flour.

The Franciscan descriptions of these stops sound “as routine as those of a pickup and delivery service,” Crosby writes. But he says the reality must have been very different. “Most missions were located in deep arroyos in mountainous terrain. The camino real wended its way over several passes at elevations of 2000 feet or more and dropped into canyons 500 to 1000 feet deep by way of steep tortuous trails.” Before being commandeered, the animals had to be rounded up, “often in rugged terrain at considerable distances from mission headquarters.” Once on the move, they all had to be fed and watered — no mean feat, according to Crosby. He says Rivera’s men must have had “to ride or hike far from the trail on most afternoons or evenings to scavenge the branches needed to sustain their beasts. In many places, water was found far enough from the camino real that the animals had to be tied together and led down to a spring or water catchment.” Putting the animals to work would have required a huge amount of additional labor from the men. They had to bundle up all the stuff being transported north and lash it onto the pack animals in balanced loads that in turn “had to be broken down each night and loaded anew each morning.”

Despite these time-consuming exertions, Rivera’s party managed to travel an average of seven miles per day, “a respectable performance,” judges Crosby, “considering the number of animals and the amount of impedimenta this party brought from Loreto and added as it went along.” At the end of December 1768, roughly three months after leaving Loreto, Rivera settled into Velicatá, an “obscure spot at the edge of known California” (in Crosby’s words) that Rivera had selected to be the expeditionary launch point. Over the succeeding weeks, the lonely site must have exploded with activity as more than three dozen soldiers, mule drivers, and cowboys and about 60 Indian neophytes converged upon it. With them they brought 100 or so riding animals, 200 beasts of burden, and another 200 head of cattle.

They were still there in February 1769, news that infuriated Gálvez when he got wind of it in Cabo San Lucas. Crosby says the visitor general ordered messengers to ride in nonstop relays to carry Rivera this curt rebuke: “Create no more delays and send no more excuses.” But Rivera wasn’t a man to be goaded into precipitous action. He continued overseeing the tedious work of organizing all that the two land-based expeditions would be transporting through the wilderness. A partial inventory survives. There were 300 pounds of gunpowder, 425 pounds of musket balls and buckshot, 1150 pounds of chocolate, 500 pounds of beef tallow, 354 pints of wine, 500 pounds of baled tobacco leaves and 12 dozen packets of cigarette papers, 4 cases of soap, 294 sets of horseshoes, plus extra horseshoe nails. Into the various piles went jugs and frying pans and tortilla griddles, planting sticks and belt knives, bridles and halters and replacement cinches. Crosby says some items doubtless were intended for the Indians the explorers expected to meet on the trail: 396 yards of assorted ribbon, 165 glass beads, 12 pairs of “white under-petticoats.” Religious paraphernalia included altar bells and baptismal caps and candlesticks, priestly vestments and Communion service towels, cruets for consecrated oil, a press for forming Communion hosts, a painting of Our Lady of the Sorrows, and much, much more.

On March 24, 1769, the crew “put the finishing touches on some 150 carefully apportioned loads for the pack animals, each limited to about 150 pounds,” according to Crosby. Late that morning, they began “working in pairs to place and secure the loads on their impressive caravan of pack beasts.” It was after four in the afternoon when the riders finally saddled up, and the entourage began to move. “Arguably the grandest aggregation of men, animals, and supplies in California history to that time,” they traveled less than four miles before stopping and unpacking, according to Crosby. He thinks the short trek was a shakedown run in which Rivera probably assessed his men’s handiwork and began “to learn what procedures he would order for the safest possible transit of three hundred miles of wilderness.”

Crosby devotes the biggest portion of his book to that adventure. He presents most of what Crespí and Cañizares recorded in their diaries. Those documents had been commissioned for specific purposes, the historian points out. In the case of Crespí, “He was writing for his Franciscan superiors,” who in turn planned to circulate the report amongst the Franciscans ‘wealthy patrons in Europe. Crosby says it wasn’t Crespí’s literary gifts that won him the job. In fact, his fellow priests wound up bowdlerizing his writing and padding it with long passages written by another man to make Crespí’s work “more elegant and more complete,” according to Crosby. Whatever Crespí’s failings as a writer, however, his superiors not only liked him, “They trusted him,” Crosby says. “They knew he was as honest as the day is long. And they knew he was just plain willing to haul his buns. He wasn’t a young man. He was in his late 40s. But he was willing to ride any distance on animalback and put up with whatever happened. He was brave.”

Cañizares was a young man, perhaps not yet 20 years old, the historian says. The only reason for including him in the expedition was that he could take sextant readings, estimate distances, and record what happened for posterity. Crosby says the ambitious youthful mariner wrote well. “If you read him in the original Spanish, it’s definitely more graceful than Crespí. Crespí is kind of a klutz.” But Cañizares came from a middle-class background that limited his view of and curiosity about the world and rendered his writing “very circumstantial,” according to Crosby. “It’s very particular. There are no overviews.”

Both men thus record their progress on the trail — what time they departed each morning, what kind of terrain they passed over, what the group’s campsites were like. Neither man saw any need to describe the gritty routines of trail life, but Crosby was able to fill in a lot of those blanks. Crosby calculates that over the last 35 years, he has logged the equivalent of 15 straight months “in which we were out there [in the Baja California wilderness] with mules as the only form of transportation. “His experiences could not have been very different from those of the explorers, the historian suggests. “They were riding exactly the same kind of animals. They were riding with the same saddles, effectively, that are in use down there to this day. We rode the traditional peninsular saddles and wore polainas to keep the thorns from our calves. And we rode the same trails. It can’t have felt that different then! Out in the tules, I think the only change of any consequence is that down in some of the valleys there are some effects of grazing, and you see cattle trails. But in an awful lot of places, you don’t even have that.”

From the vantage point of that experience, Crosby writes that the foremost concern for the Rivera party must have been “the daily necessity to feed, water, and properly employ the beasts of burden…”Other than Rivera and Crespí, each man “surely tended his own mount and gear. And beyond that, there were more than five pack animals per mounted man. Each morning those had to be led or driven, along with the riding animals, to a source of water, returned to camp, covered with a blanket, cinched up with [a] leather pack-saddle, then either loaded with rolled items, or outfitted with a pair of…rawhide hampers” loaded with food, water, and smaller gear. Every evening the tiresome drill had to be carried out in reverse.

The diaries don’t reveal how Rivera’s party communicated with the group that followed in its footsteps two months later. The historian thinks it’s possible the men simply agreed ahead of time to leave a signal if a campsite turned out to be a bad choice. “They wouldn’t have needed to mark the campsites. Every one of these frontier guys would know” where the advance party had stopped, Crosby asserts. “Eight weeks later? It would be absolutely obvious. There’d be all kinds of little indications. Campfires. They may have been stacking up stone cairns. “They may have left written notes. “But we simply don’t know.”

Readers of the diaries get occasional peeks at the natural world through which the expedition was traversing. On April 7, for example, both Crespí and Cañizares tell how Rivera and some of his scouts came upon a large pack of wolves near a fair-sized river. “The river,” Crespí writes, “is banked by steep inclines without there being soil on either side of it, instead nothing but immensely high hills, and one must, in order to get by it, zigzag along the few slopes that are afforded by its sides. There are huge numbers of luxuriant wild grapevines, and timber…” But, appends Crosby, “born into an age before travel and travel writing,” both diarists fail to “note much of what meets the eye of one riding down the arroyo in this season today” — lilacs and matilija poppies in full bloom, oaks and sycamores and willows, “impressive close groupings of very large Garambullo cactus.”

The diarists are only a bit less perfunctory when it comes to chronicling the hardships they and their fellow travelers encountered along the way. Crespí mentions that a heavy frost one night in early April brought the group to “near perishing of the chill.” Terrible thirst racked the men on a few occasions when the scouts failed to find water, and they also encountered drenching rains. Rivera slept in a tent, but Crosby thinks all the other men probably would have had only a bedroll consisting of a blanket and a tarp made of tightly woven canvas. “If it’s a hot night, you just spread the thing out and sleep on top of it. But if it starts to rain, you take half of it and throw it over you. You’re inside the fold — like you’re the filling in a taco. It’s a simple technique and it works quite well. Plus those guys almost by instinct would have picked out spots where the water would run off and go away from them. They also had saddle blankets that they could have doubled and used as pillows. So they probably got a little wet, but they didn’t lie there soaked all night. These guys had done this all their lives.”

What most of them had never done before, what few people ever have experienced, was to meet up with group after group of Indians who didn’t know that white people existed. Their first encounter with a “heathen” came just one day after they left Velicatá. “Still a boy,” this Indian was “naked and heavily painted in stripes,” Crespí reports, adding that a soldier gave him a lighted cigar, “which he smoked with great address.” Crosby says this boy no doubt spoke Cochimí, the native language of the Indians included in Rivera’s entourage.

Less than three weeks after leaving Velicatá, however, the expedition entered territory traditionally occupied by the Paipai, taking “another step deeper into the unknown, into areas where none of the traveling group could communicate verbally,” Crosby writes. “Sign language was now the order of the day.” Contacts reported in the diaries from this point on sound edgier, more challenging, and often mystifying.

On the early afternoon of April 16, for example, Cañizares reports that “the soldiers ran after some natives and succeeded in capturing an old man who was so extremely arrogant that we were all disgusted by his actions, for they showed him to be nothing but an old witch doctor.” The scouts also apprehended a boy, two women who “seemed to be more gentle,” and a younger man so furious that “he yanked out bits of his hair. “Crespí marveled, “How the adult heathen might be distinguished from the ugliest demon ever depicted, I cannot say, for a single glance at his face with its bands of white, yellow, and red paint was enough to horrify one.”

The priest reports that Rivera passed out beads and ribbons and gave the women “earrings and cups,” generosity that prompted the natives to depart in good spirits. Other encounters went less well. On May 3, close to today’s central Ensenada, the group ran into a large group of naked men armed with bows and arrows. This group dogged the expedition party over the next few days, and tension escalated. By May 7, “a good-sized throng” of the natives were shadowing the intruders, shouting “in a loud chorus,” according to Crespí. “[A]ll naked, heavily armed, and with large quivers on their backs and bows and arrows in their hands…all went running along the crests of the hills in view alongside of us.” Rivera urged restraint, but on the next morning, when three of the Indians shot arrows at the company, “The captain fired a shot at the boldest of the Indians, and one of the soldiers followed up with another. Neither of them hit a single Indian, but the sound of the shot was medicine,” Cañizares says. Adds Crespí, “Once the heathens heard the two shots, their legs could not take them fast enough up to the crest of the ridge behind the slope. Once at the top they continued as before with their hubbub and outcries, we ourselves still standing by, until finally they tired and sat down and, perhaps weary of it all, gave a loud whoop and went off behind the hill, vanishing from our sight.”

The next day brought a jollier turn of events. After coming upon an Indian settlement of 17 houses, Rivera was willing to risk additional diplomacy. He laid out beads and other gifts, then backed away. One of the Indians reciprocated, depositing on neutral ground a fishing net and some arrows before retreating. Eventually, Rivera lured the natives into his camp, where “great speechifying” took place, along with more exchanging of Spanish trinkets for Indian barbecued sardines. These Indians Crespí judged “very tractable, happy, and well behaved.”

The sardines may have been as welcome as the friendly behavior. Despite the tons of food that Rivera’s party had set out with, the group had run out of dried beef after about six weeks, and the captain had put everyone (except Crespí) “onto such a limited ration that there was only enough food to prevent fainting,” Cañizares recorded. “Each person was allotted eight ounces of flour made into two tortillas daily.” That didn’t include the Indians who had accompanied the expedition from Velicatá. Crosby says retrospective accounts make it clear that they were expected to forage for their food, one of the seamier aspects of the enterprise and a detail the diarists never mention.

The diarists also never say a word about how their Indian expedition members reacted to the “savages” the group met along the way, but again Crosby has his own ideas. He says his hunch is that the mission Indians, “however badly fed,” saw themselves as members of the Spaniards’ party. “The mission Indians knew the Spaniards reasonably well, and in a certain sense trusted them. They knew the power of the firearms.” And Crosby rejects the notion that it took force to keep the Indians on the missions. “There were things about aboriginal life that were very unattractive,” he contends. “And once people had been brought together at mission centers and exposed to a kind of village life, women in particular [must have relished] the opportunity to socialize, to be away from these little bands of 60 to 80 people max, who broke up every day and spread out and collected [food] and only got together in very small groups. “Given that, Crosby guesses that “there wasn’t a thought in a single one of their minds about jumping ship to join [the heathen tribes]… I’m thinking the farther north they all got, the more Spanish the Indians became.”

It was the sardine-barbecuing Indians who gave Rivera and his men the news that their journey was nearing an end. According to Crespí, they told the group “by signs, how two ships had gone by; and we understood from the signs that they were not far away.” Four days later, the men climbed the hills east of modern-day Playas de Tijuana; in the distance, they glimpsed two masts. The next day, May 14, they hiked close to 15 miles, “and with all good fortune and happiness, we gained the sight of our long wished-for, splendid Harbor of San Diego, and anchored there the two packet-boats San Carlos and El Principe,” concludes Crespí’s record of the journey.

Cañizares estimated that they had traveled 121 leagues (just over 300 miles). How accurate was that? Crosby wanted to check, but by the mid- 1990s, he’d come to think that he had misrepresented part of the expeditionary route when he worked on The Call to California back in 1967. He had asked his guide then how one would go, for example, if one wanted to ride from San Juan de Dios to San Telmo (two place names mentioned by the diarists).“But I wasn’t smart enough to give him the whole deck!” Crosby says today. “What I failed to say was: ‘Look, these guys were equipped with 25 mounted men, probably 10 to 15 Indian assistants, and 188 loaded pack animals.’ ” Had he known that, his guide would have factored in the need to use a trail with enough water and greenery to sustain the animals, Crosby asserts.

The lack of a good map had also limited his fieldwork back in the ’60s, Crosby knew. The best one available then had a scale of only 1:500,000; on it, a block about an inch and a quarter square covered a hundred square miles. In 1974, however, the Mexican government had released “a superb series of maps covering the entire state of Baja California” on a scale ten times bigger. Crosby says he knew these would be invaluable in reassessing the historic route.

In 1995, Crosby and a friend, armed with the new maps and the expedition diaries, worked out a revised armchair route that Crosby later checked on four or five different field trips. This route, reproduced in Crosby’s new book and supplemented with GPS coordinates for every campsite, “coincides with, or lies very near, that followed by the 1769 pioneers,” Crosby writes. “If that sounds overconfident, remember that half the ground traversed is very rough and broken, and usually offers only one ‘best way’ to pass through.” Crosby says when he finally measured the revised route, the total distance came to 121 leagues, just as Cañizares had declared.

Crosby says he hopes modern-day adventurers will hike the route. They’ll have “to plan and plant supplies or make deals with ranchers or something, because I doubt that you could carry enough food on your back to go the whole way. But there’s water. Demonstrably, any place you can take animals, you can take people. If necessary, you take iodine pills or filters, and you may have to use water that you’re not too thrilled with. But it can be done. And by the way, it’s very pretty! Not every step of it. A lot of the northern part is right along the highway. But from San Telmo south, it would be a pretty exciting trip to make. I know my grandsons and sons-in-law were impressed.”

The genealogical implications of Crosby’s work will be more complex, apt to make him a hero in some eyes and a villain in others, he predicts. He says he sought feedback from three different Hispanic genealogical organizations before the new book was published, and he’s already received “plaintive notes saying, ‘Why did you leave Juan María Olivera out? He was in the pioneer expedition.’ Or ‘Why did you leave Mariano Cordero off?’ and so forth.” Confusing these descendants is the fact that Bancroft, the famous 19th-century historian, published a list of “pioneers” that included people who came to Alta California from 1769 to 1773. While Crosby’s research doesn’t invalidate Bancroft’s list, it shrinks the number of true pioneers to a much more elite group: the original marchers.

Crosby acknowledges that his work may also detract from the glory once enjoyed by Junípero Serra, pointing out as it does that the priest “had absolutely nothing to do” with the success of the expedition. “He was just along for the ride.” Later Franciscan writers became the main storytellers describing the opening of the Alta California frontier, and as a result, Franciscans tended to get all the credit for that achievement. “Gateway to Alta California is trying to disabuse that notion,” Crosby says. “History is a lot messier than it’s often made to appear.”